5 Unusual Ways to Become a Better Speaker You’ve been asked to speak at an important event. It’s a great opportunity and you should be thrilled—but since you rarely speak, especially in a formal setting, all you can think about is bombing. Unfortunately, captivating an audience is definitely a skill that takes years to develop and hone. Since you don’t have that kind of time, here are five unconventional ways to become a better speaker almost overnight: 1. Admitting a mistake is great but not when used simply to show how far you’ve come. 2. Then when you start speaking again, the audience naturally 1) assumes the pause was intentional and 2) decides you’re actually a confident and accomplished speaker. 3. 4. 5. And don’t worry that you’ll be missing out on an opportunity: When you help people make their professional or personal lives better, you’ve done all the selling you’ll need to do.
Cotton Fabric Cleans Itself When Exposed to Sunlight | Inspiring Discoveries | Science By David SkoumbourdisEpoch Times Staff Created: December 21, 2011 Last Updated: June 26, 2012 A newly-developed fabric coated with nanoparticles can clean itself when exposed to sunlight. (Photos.com) Clothing that cleans and de-odorizes itself will be a reality thanks to the development of a cotton fabric that removes stains and kills bacteria when exposed to ordinary sunlight. The self-cleaning properties of the fabric are due to a special coating of nanoparticles made from a compound of titanium dioxide and nitrogen. Titanium dioxide is known for its ability to break down dirt and kill microbes under certain types of light and is already used in goods such as self-cleaning windows, floor, wall tiles, and self-de-odorizing socks. In their study, Long and Wu demonstrate how a fabric coated with their nanoparticle compound removes an orange dye stain when exposed to sunlight. The findings were published online in the American Chemical Society journal Applied Materials and Interfaces.
Body Language - guide to reading body language signals in management, training, courtship, flirting and other communications and relationships home » writing/communicating » body language how to read body language signs and gestures - non-verbal communications - male and female, for work, social, dating, and mating relationships Body Language - technically known as kinesics (pronounced 'kineesicks') - is a significant aspect of modern communications and relationships. Body Language is therefore very relevant to management and leadership, and to all aspects of work and business where communications can be seen and physically observed among people. Body language is also very relevant to relationships outside of work, for example in dating and mating, and in families and parenting. Communication includes listening. Body language goes both ways: Your own body language reveals your feelings and meanings to others. The sending and receiving of body language signals happens on conscious and unconscious levels. (N.B. body language index introduction and basics body language definitions background and history nature or nurture? So can you.
Psychologists Use Social Networking Behavior to Predict Personality Type One of the foundations of modern psychology is that human personality can be described in terms of five different forms of behavior. These are: 1. Agreeableness–being helpful, cooperative and sympathetic towards others2. Psychologists have spent much time and many years developing tests that can classify people according to these criteria. Today, Shuotian Bai at the Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and a couple of buddies say they have developed an online version of the test that can determine an individual’s personality traits from their behavior on a social network such as Facebook or Renren, an increasingly popular Chinese competitor. Their method is relatively simple. At the same time, these guys analyzed the Renren pages of each student, recording their age and sex and various aspects of their online behavior such as the frequency of their blog posts as well as the emotional content of the posts such as whether angry, funny or surprised and so on.
Lucid Dreams If you’ve never experienced it then you may find it hard to understand what lucid dreaming is all about. In fact you may be thoroughly sceptical and dismiss the whole thing as silly nonsense. But I can tell you from personal experience that lucid dreams are very real and something that many millions of people regularly enjoy. Note: Due to the huge amount of interest that this post has generated I am now seriously considering writing a book on the subject, and I would welcome input from anyone with an interest. These types of dreams are hyper-real in that when you experience one it is bursting with vibrant colour, there’s often marvellous music playing in the background (if you listen for it), the air is the freshest and sweetest you’ve ever smelled, and you are the healthiest you have ever been (or could ever be). Lucid dreaming is when you experience full consciousness while dreaming. When you ‘wake up’ inside a dream you can consciously appreciate just how wonderful dreams really are.
48. How Renaissance People Think Do you think like a polymath? Here's a quick test: If you cringed as you read the question and thought to yourself " ", then you're on the polymath path. According to psychologist Seymour Epstein's cognitive-experiential self-theory, humans have two parallel but interacting modes of information processing. According to Epstein [1], A large body of research by Epstein and others, including a hot-off-the-press article in the [1], supports the importance of harnessing modes of thought. Heavily influenced by the important work of Epstein and many other psychologists investigating the dual-process nature of the human mind [2][3], I make a distinction between "controlled" and "spontaneous" thought in my Dual-Process (DP) Theory of Human Intelligence [3][4]. To see how each mode of thought comes with both advantages and disadvantages, here is a summary of a number of findings over the years showing both the positive and negative attributes associated with each thinking style:
IBM reveals five innovations that will change our lives in the next five years (Update) Today IBM formally unveiled the sixth annual “IBM 5 in 5" (#ibm5in5) – a list of innovations that have the potential to change the way people work, live and interact during the next five years. The next IBM 5 in 5 is based on market and societal trends as well as emerging technologies from IBM’s research labs around the world that can make these transformations possible. People power will come to life. Anything that moves or produces heat has the potential to create energy that can be captured. Walking. Advances in renewable energy technology will allow individuals to collect this kinetic energy, which now goes to waste, and use it to help power our homes, offices and cities. Imagine attaching small devices to the spokes on your bicycle wheels that recharge batteries as you pedal along. Created energy comes in all shapes and forms and from anything around us. You will never need a password again. You will no longer need to create, track or remember multiple passwords for various log-ins.
Detecting Lies: Top 3 Myths, Top 5 Proven Factors Lies are extremely difficult to detect. Research shows the average person barely does any better than chance. Part of the reason may be there’s so much misinformation about how to detect lies floating around. Years of work in psychology, including research from real police interviews conducted by Aldert Vrij and colleagues, provides guidance on which nonverbal signals do and which don’t signal lying (Vrij, 2006). First we’ve got to dump the misconceptions: People don’t actually fidget and look away when they’re lying. How do these misconceptions come about? So, with those misconceptions dealt with, what can psychology research tell us about how to detect lies? Individual differences are key. Next time you’re tempted to assume your partner would never lie to you but the nervous-looking person in the office probably does, stop and think again. » This post is part of a series on nonverbal behaviour. References – Click here to toggle visibility Vrij, A. (2006).
Color Psychology by David Johnson Like death and taxes, there is no escaping color. It is ubiquitous. Yet what does it all mean? Colors often have different meanings in various cultures. Black Black is the color of authority and power. White Brides wear white to symbolize innocence and purity. Red The most emotionally intense color, red stimulates a faster heartbeat and breathing. The most romantic color, pink, is more tranquilizing. Blue The color of the sky and the ocean, blue is one of the most popular colors. Green Currently the most popular decorating color, green symbolizes nature. Yellow Cheerful sunny yellow is an attention getter. Purple The color of royalty, purple connotes luxury, wealth, and sophistication. Brown Solid, reliable brown is the color of earth and is abundant in nature. Colors of the Flag In the U.S. flag, white stands for purity and innocence. Food for Thought While blue is one of the most popular colors it is one of the least appetizing.
13. Six Clues to Character Seconds after Tamara was ushered into his office, Michael knew she was right for the creative staff of the advertising team he ran. Within a year, they were not only a productive duo professionally, they were dating. She soon jumped to another agency largely so they could live together openly. A year later, they were married and enacting their plan to start a boutique agency together. Business grew comfortably although not spectacularly—until the recession hit. The harder she worked, the more Michael's praise got under Tamara's skin; she grew to hate being viewed as indefatigable. It's taken over two rocky years for the shame , the anger , and the disappointment to subside. Does any one of us know who our lovers, our friends, our business partners, our children—and even we ourselves— will become, especially when tossed into a new set of circumstances? Even with children, development is not a mystery, says Susan Engel, a psychologist at Williams College. Intelligence: The Biggest Boon
MIT Creates New Energy Source This is some pretty exciting news. It seems that researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the most prestigious science and engineering schools in the United States, has created a new energy source -- and it's clean and renewable. The odd thing is that the only way you can see this energy source is with a very powerful microscope, because it is created by using nanotechnology. For a few years now, we have been hearing about the possibilities offered by the new field of nanotechnology. Now it looks like the first usable breakthrough has been accomplished. The researchers built tiny wires out of carbon nanotubes. The nanotechnology batteries will have a couple of other advantages over current batteries. Second, these batteries are non-toxic since they are made of carbon. Computers, cell phones and other electronic devices will be the first to benefit from the nanotechnology batteries. (The picture above is an artist's rendition of a carbon nanotube.)
Have You Ever Been Scammed? Perhaps you’ve lost some loose change on the street hunting the lady while trying to beat the ‘three-card trick’? This is the one where three cards are moved one over the other and you have to find a particular card. It appears easy when you watch someone else winning but, when you step up to have a go at the makeshift table, you keep losing. The card should be where you think it is, but it’s not. So you lose a bit of cash. I like card tricks, although the mechanical explanations of their workings are usually disappointing. The interest for me in card tricks, and in magic generally, is the psychology. Sheep theory The three-card trick relies on what is variously known in psychology as ‘emergent norm theory’ or ‘crowd psychology’ or what I like to call ‘sheep theory’. Baaaaaaaaaa! If I had to explain only one thing to someone who knew nothing about psychology, it would be ‘sheep theory’. One classic example of sheep theory is Stanley Milgram’s famous electro-shock obedience experiment.
10 Truths To Keep Your Relationship Healthy I think it's easy to make things more complicated than they need to be. Here are some basic rules of the relationship road that will keep you headed in the right direction 1. Successful relationships take work. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. There are no guarantees, but couples who practice these techniques have longer and stronger relationships than those who are not proactive in their love. Dr. 12. How Your Greatest Insecurities Reveal Your Deepest Gifts In my decades of practice as a psychotherapist, this is the insight that has inspired me most: Our deepest wounds surround our greatest gifts. I've found that the very qualities we're most ashamed of, the ones we keep trying to reshape or hide, are in fact the key to finding real love. I call them core gifts. It's so easy to get lost in the quest for self-improvement. Over the years, I realized that the characteristics of my clients which I found most inspiring, most essentially them, were the ones which frequently caused them the most suffering. Some clients would complain of feeling like they were "too much"; too intense, too angry, or too demanding. Other clients said they felt that they felt like they were "not enough"; too weak, too quiet, too ineffective. Clients would describe lives devastated by codependency, and I would see an immense generosity with no healthy limits. Again and again, where my clients saw their greatest wounds, I also saw their most defining gifts!